The business and culture of our digital lives, from the L.A. Times

Facebook's Zuckerberg gets richer and gives some of it away

September 22, 2010 | 5:29
pm

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is in a giving mood.

With a Hollywood film about to open that portrays him as a scheming backstabber in building the world's most popular social networking service, Zuckerberg is about to donate $100 million to help turn around the Newark public school system, reports the Wall Street Journal. He will discuss the donation on Oprah.

At the same time, Forbes magazine is reporting that the 26-year-old self-made billionaire has jumped to No. 35 on the Forbes 400 with an estimated fortune of $6.9 billion, leapfrogging Apple co-founder Steve Jobs whose net worth of $6.1 billion ranks him as the 42nd richest American.

Zuckerberg’s wealth has ballooned with private equity investments in Facebook that valued it at about $23 billion. Some estimates based on private shares in the secondary markets place the company’s value as high as $34 billion.

Jobs, who founded Apple before Zuckerberg was born, gets most of his money from his stake in Disney, which he picked up in 2006 when he sold his Pixar animation studio to Disney.

The two Silicon Valley titans are increasingly treading on each other’s turf, Apple, the maker of the iPhone, with a social networking service called Ping, and Facebook with its drive to get its popular service on mobile devices, perhaps even its own phone.